GearCity 1.20 Progress Thread!

[Eric.B]

1.20 will come out over three important builds. Each build will finish parts of the game for the final product.

The first build will focus on adding and improving expenses and revenue streams in the game. Thus moving us closer to a final feature complete set of "rules" in the game. This build will include parts income, warranty expenses, revised union system, racing revenues, pension funding, and much more. It does not include company to company licensing system which will be implemented at a later date. Nor income generated from the financing system which we will get to later.

The second phase of the 1.20 release will be focused on improving and optimizing the AI. The AI has been fairly weak since it has not received any major updates in a long time. Over the year or two many new features have been released thus putting the AI at a disadvantage. The first phase of 1.20 will implement almost every source of income and expenses in the game, therefor we can now start moving toward finalizing the AI. This means significant amount of time devoted to speeding up the turn times, thus freeing up CPU cycles to devote to improving the AI and giving you folks a challenge!


The final important build of 1.20 will be a redesign of the financing system. This means a redesign of the stock system (which is why phase 1 and 2 of 1.20 is important) as well as some improvements to the banking system and how you deal with other companies in the game via merger/holding system.

We'll then do some clean up, making sure all the parts work together and ta-da! 1.20 will be ready!


GearCity 1.20 Change Log
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
+Used Vehicle System using real vehicles sold.
+Parts revenues using old vehicles sold.
+Warranty Expenses on vehicles sold over the last 3 years.
+Selling vehicle below scrap value will automatically sell out.
+Adjusted City Growth Rate Bonuses based on player and AI interaction.
+Fixed Chart crash in December.
+Fixed Mega Menu Branch to Factory while District is selected bug.
+Fixed bad rendering of Factory Image in Mega Menu on OpenGL
+Fixed Chassis/Gearbox ratings issues that were caused by design skills.
+Nurfed engine torque, boosted RPM's adjusted engine power ratings.
+Fixed listing of unfinished vehicles in Auto Commands
+Fixed missing GUI for contract revenues in sales book revenues section.
+Fixed bug not giving you trim discounts on vehicles already in development.
+Fixed bug giving you trim discounts on vehicles already in development!
+Adjusted research team gains when technology and design skill are stagnate.
+Fixed bug in research team gains amount.
+Fixed bug in district system which allows production line assignment to factories in war zones that are not in hq country.
+Fixed bug in GearBox cloning sliders.
+Possible Alt-tab bug fix
+Intel Video Card driver warning for people using outdated Intel video drivers in Windows.
+Fixed bug in trim naming system that does not carry the name over to advance design.
+Fixed bug in Local Inventory reports which showed wrong inventory levels in certain circumstances.
+Fixed missing data bug in View Details panel for factories.
+Increased Click timeout rate as Crimson AMD drivers are having frame rate issues with shadows.
+Decreased Shadow texture quality. May disable high quality shadows for AMD Crimson drivers. (Getting too many negative reviews from people who won't email me if the game is crashing constantly on their computers :'( )
+Fixed bug with mouse wheel that did not update mouse position over lists. (Thus allowing for incorrect clicking positions)
+Administration costs and employee levels now increase linearly with the number of active marques you have.
+Restructured Marketing internally. This should improve marketing performance (and save game file size) dramatically by combining budgets for each vehicle into a single row instead of individual rows.
+Marketing information (Such as costs or employees) are now pulled from a past saved record instead of directly from the current funding. (Meaning expense reports will show what you did last turn not what you're doing this turn...)
+Marketing employee calculations have been simplified, employee count has increased.
+Updated all third party libraries to the newest versions. (Still requires stability testing.)
+Recompiled everything with _secure_scl disabled, this should greatly improve turn times, however stability testing is still required and may be re-enabled.
+Fixed crash when switching back to office while in the middle of creating a custom district on the world map.
+Fixed bug in Mega Menu and World Map which did not list vehicles that were for sale but production had ended.
+Fixed bug when closing a factory it does not remove engine contracts assigned to it.
+Fixed bug when taking over a company you do not inherit contracts.
+Fixed bug engine contract breach bug.
+Fixed remove contracted engine from factory bug in Assigned Contracts window.
+Defined Contribution Benefits System and other monthly Employee Benefits
+Defined Benefit (Corporate Pension) payouts and funds system.
+Adjustments to shipping costs
+Merchandising Revenues
+Adjustments to Marketing Skill growths
+Fixed 1997 Hong Kong Flag Crash
+Fixed Racing "Signed Teams" bug
+Racing Revenues
+Revised Racing Results
+Racing View Competition
+Fixed Racing Champ series selection breaking Racing Funding and View Competition windows when both are open.
+Fixed Mega Menu Factory Change crash when no factories in company
+Fixed Mega Menu Branch assigning when there is no branch in city.
+Fixed Magazine Model Comparison bug that caused incorrect data on right column.
+Rewrite Strike Timing System and Strike Wage Check system.
+Adjusted Moral Decline/Gain based on wages.
+Racing Employees (They're tied to Researching Employees)
+AI assigns benefits
+Employee Moral Effected by poor benefits, strikes may happen now even when using auto-wages.
+Union Benefits Action Memo
+Strike Action Memo
+Removed Unions from Phone Menu in Office. All Strikes will now cause Action Memos.
+Changed Agreed Strike Wages checking system. Should be less buggy.
+Union Benefits Demand Negotiations. (Might be able to save a few % if your company is doing poorly)
+Benefits Systems is opt-in. If you play the game on Easy or Medium you will have to check Benefits System on in the Advanced Settings. If you play the game on Hard the Benefits System will automatically be on in the Advanced Settings.
+HR Employee Hiring now shows Strike Agreed Wages instead of Average.
+Agreeing to new benefits package will reset department moral.
+Adjusted down branch employee numbers.
+Fixed incorrect amount of branch employees on new game starter branch.
+Automatically increase the amount of branch employees needed every year.
+1 additional branch employee needed for every 100 vehicles sold.
+Employee Furlough System
+Fixed Wealthy car index (Limos, Landu, Supercars) insane margins bug.
+Disabled Dynamic Popularity for wealth index car types above 6 (Luxury Sedans, Limos, Landus, Supercars)
+Monthly Factory Costs increase based on how many different components are being produced at the factory.
+Fixed bug in assisted chassis designer, does engine fit tool.
+Low Definition Texture toggle.
+Improved decal system selectability. (Modern Headlights/Tailights and up coming stuff such as door jams.)
+Fixed compositor and shader crash in OSX
+Fixed possible crashes in OSX
+Fixed upgrading factory bug which charges 2 additional months of construction costs.
+Minor boost to buying populations in normal and hard mode.
+Improvements to AI system
+Improvements to turn times (Improved AI play counters this)
+Fixed bug in AI factory building which caused Stock Values to crash, bankrupting companies.
+Improved Assisted Designer AI
+Improved Automatic Production System.
+New components artwork
+New Advance Difficulty Settings sliders
+Displaying incorrect monthly expense in sales book when updating factories.
+Fixed crash when creating custom districts with no cities.
+Fixed inactive model listing in RnD View Parts/Vehicles.
+Fixed possibility to get negative points in racing.
+Fixed bug in marketing which deletes all marketing in a city if you 0 out a single type
+Fixed slider position issue in megamenu
+Fixed bug in AI which caused vehicles to be sold at production costs when opening new branches.
+Improved AI single cylinder designs to prevent 0hp cars.
+Fixed view factory costs in world map view factory details
+Fixed bug calculating factory labor.
+Disabled charts for the first year of the game to prevent crashing (Charts are going to be redesigned in v1.21.)
+Removed "Banked Funds" and attached features
+Implemented interest income on "Cash Funds"
+Implemented Revolving Line of Credit
+Revised Loan Offer System
+Allowing Multiple Loans
+Adjustable Loan Request System
+Revised Banking GUI
+Revised Credit Rating system
+AI debt financing improvements
+Fixed bug in world map showing incorrect "Market Status" when flagged with '-2' at war with destroyable factories.
+Bond System.
+AI uses Bonds System.
+Revised Stock System GUI
+IPO Valuation adjustment.
+Stock Dilution system
+Stock Dilution Lawsuit Action Memo
+Manual 2:1 and Reserve 1:2 split.
+Increased Automatic 2:1 split price to $300.
+Marque Management System
+Creator/Marque Ownership of properties and designs
+Assign marque ownership of property.
+Display marque's assets
+Display marque's image.
+Improved, more realistic spinoff system.
+Sell marque to competition.
+Adjusted costs and sales prices to spinoff/sell marques.
+Revised discontinue marque system that removes all designs and properties (if you choose to.)
+Dividend Payment System.
+AI dividends
+Wholly Owned Subsidiary System
+Revised Stock Buying
+Revised Stock Selling
+Share price moves based on how many shares you are buying/selling
+Revised Stock Valuation system.
+Implemented P/E stock price valuation system.
+AI holdings
+AI Holders
+Player Holders
+Player Holdings.
+Adjust dividend rates of subsidiaries you control.
+Improved Stock Overview gui
+Fixed AI emerging from bankruptcy bug.
+Stock Acquisition System
+Improves AI Buying/Selling of shares
+Improved AI takeover system
+Grill Artwork
-Fixed bug in buying purchasing if you already own the stock
-Wrote a new xml/po converter for translation system.
-Shareholder morale.
-Shareholders demand dividend action memo.
-You can be fired from CEO position.
-Fixed bug in employee Morale system causing endless wage demands.
-Board of Directors can now requite you spin off a marque.
-Fixed Wholly Owned Subsidiary percentage display.
-AI will now disable dividend lock if no ones owns over 50% of the company.
-Purchase bankrupt Marque from creditors action memo. (Default disabled.)
-Enable/Disable purchase bankrupt marque setting in Auto-Commands.
-Fixed bug not showing Dividend Adjustment button if you own less than 50% of your company.
-Fixed Company Holdings/Holders bugs.
-Fixed bugs causing the company lists to change when you should be on the view showing the companies which you hold.
-Fixed bug not removing a company from holding list after you sell all your shares.
-You can now view and reactivate discontinued marques.
-Rename Company
-Change Company Logo
-Move company HQ
-Consolidate company
-Some GUI loading optimizations
-Fixed showroom showing in-development vehicles bug.
-Stack Overflow fixes for GCC (Linux) (Possible fixes for VC and Clang.)
-AI now develops engines specifically for racing.
-AI now develops cars specifically for racing.
-Fixed company consolidation exploit.
-Adjustments to stock pricing
-Adjustments to market cap
-Adjustments to acquisition pricing
-Tweaked historical effect on stock markets (may need a little more adjusting with the new system.)
-Fixed 2 bugs that can cause a stock to show up as $0 with only 1 share.
-Renamed "New Model Year" to "New Generation" to avoid confusion.
-Auto production will not longer build in factories that are at war.
-Auto production now randomly spreads out production to at most 3 factories per adjustment. (Thus reducing shipping costs for global companies.)
-Reworked design pace slider's effect and costs. Thus fixing a number of bugs. And nurfing slow pace.
-Brought design pace into line with more realistic engineering times.
-Fixed Racing Competition always showing 2 years bug.
-Fixed bug in Mega Menu that changes cities when jumping between marketing to branch.
-Fixed bug in Mega Menu that did not automatically set a branch's shipping distance when selecting unsold vehicle models.
-Fixed bug in GearCity XMLPO converter that causes translations po to lose their translations.
-Updated all translation to 1.20
-Basic testing of some translation and included them in the 1.20 update.
-Financial State Hotkeys

[Eric.B]

I've spent the entire weekend working on the Used Car system.

Previous versions of GearCity used sort of a dissatisfied customer approach to used car sales. Although it went through various changes through the versions, it typically worked like this: Customers would be broken down into demographics, they would look at the vehicles that fit their type. If they didn't like those vehicles, couldn't afford them, or they were out of stock, they would be "pooled" into looking at other vehicles, and if those other vehicles didn't work, they bought used.

Along with those customers some customers automatically went off to buy a used vehicle.


But this had some flaws. Since we simulate all vehicle sales, how were people buying used cars that didn't exist? The used cars were effecting high end cars the same as low end cars. In the real world a new compact cars typically have to compete with a slightly used sedan or luxury vehicle.

To fix this problem I wanted to take every vehicle sold in the last 10 years. Filter out x number of them based on some city data, and then have those vehicles directly compete against new vehicles for sale. This model would be the most realistic option. And let me tell you, it was awesome and worked well... Except for one major issue.... Turn times.

All the used cars flooded the turn calculations, thus slowing the turn times down by 600%!!! So I worked out another option.


We generate a number of used cars based on the number of vehicles sold over the last 7 years. These used cars are then applied to the consumer demographics looking to buy a vehicle. We then adjust the demographics numbers based on the available vehicles before we calculate new vehicles. Demographics looking for lower wealth index vehicles such as a compact car are hit harder than upper wealth income demographics. Thus the more used cars in the market, the greater impact on new vehicle sales. City, regional, and world economic conditions as well as city stats. Newer used vehicles also impact sales greater than older used vehicles...

It's working good so far, some more testing will be needed though to balance the numbers to real world levels.

To answer the question about generating revenues from used vehicles. For the most part manufacturers do not make anything off used vehicles besides OEM parts. Dealerships, who are typically ran by different companies, are the ones who profit from used vehicles. This is why they pay you for old vehicles and don't mind selling you used vehicles off their lots. It's higher margin business for them.


Which brings me to the next point. The used vehicle system implements a new framework inside GearCity. We're using this new framework to generate parts revenues as well warranty expenses in the future.

Currently parts revenues are generated from the number of vehicles you've sold in the last 5 years. (This is roughly the age that customers start buying after market instead of OEM parts.) It factors in the vehicle price, component dependability, as well as vehicle dependability and quality. Currently these numbers are being balanced, but it's working well so far. I may put the years on a scale since people tend to keep older vehicles using OEM parts in the early years until the after market parts business started booming in the 60s. We'll see.

Anyhoo both these features are implemented, I'll spend the next couple days balancing them and then I'll implement warranty expenses!

(And if you notice by the length of this post, I have a lot of time to kill while the game is simulating these changes...)

-Used Vehicle System using real vehicles sold.
-Parts revenues using old vehicles sold.

[Eric.B]

Been a while since the last update, but none the less we're still hard at work.

Since the last few days fell over a holiday, I spent most of the time focused on little bugs that have cropped up lately. I'll probably go back to major 1.19.1 features wednesday-ish.

So what did I do?
-Fixed Chart crash in December.
-Fixed Mega Menu Branch to Factory while District is selected bug.
-Fixed bad rendering of Factory Image in Mega Menu on OpenGL
-Fixed Chassis/Gearbox ratings issues that were caused by design skills.
-Nurfed engine torque, boosted RPM's adjusted engine power ratings.
-Fixed listing of unfinished vehicles in Auto Commands
-Fixed missing GUI for contract revenues in sales book revenues section.
-Fixed bug not giving you trim discounts on vehicles already in development.
-Fixed bug giving you trim discounts on vehicles already in development!
-Adjusted research team gains when technology and design skill are stagnate.
-Fixed bug in research team gains amount.
-Fixed bug in district system which allows production line assignment to factories in war zones that are not in hq country.
-Fixed bug in GearBox cloning sliders.
-Possible Alt-tab bug fix
-Intel Video Card driver warning for people using outdated Intel video drivers in Windows. (Hopefully this will reduce some of our negative reviews since these people never email me their log files so I can tell them how to fix their crashing problems. )

Probably a few more things I missed, as I said, lot of little things!

[Eric.B]

Well crap, looks like I missed an entire post here...

Here it is:

Warranty Expenses have been added. Defective vehicles will cost your company. The "warranty" covers 3 years of vehicles sold. Compared to OEM parts revenues, the frequency per vehicle is greater, however the costs are cheaper per part (since warranties are done at costs and OEM parts are done with a profit margin.) Some months this may cost more than OEM parts revenues, other months, it will be less.

In the future we may make the warranties adjustable. I'll take a look at it again after optimizations in 1.19.2


Fixed an illogical bug, If you sell a vehicle below scrap value (10% of unit costs) you will now automatically sell out of the vehicle. This should fix the "My car won't sell for $1" issue...

Finally I have readjusted city growth rate bonuses based on player and AI interaction with cities. I'm currently in the middle of testing this. It takes quite a bit of time to do so as I have to simulate the entire game to make sure rates are not outrageous!

[Eric.B]

Happy New Years everyone!

I'm in the middle of rewriting the backend to the Marketing system. And need to make a major decision. I would like feedback on this since it would change game play, and possibly take a little micromanagement power away from the users.

Please read and give me your thoughts: http://www.ventdev.com/forums/showthread...65#pid7365

[Eric.B]

It's been almost a week since the last update on progress. But fret not, I've worked every day since then! Most of the changes however are not very visible to the end user thus why I haven't updated the thread.

So what have we done since the last post? We've received a lot of little bug reports over the last few days with the influx of Winter Sales players. I've cleaned up most as I got them.
Here is what I've marked down:
-Fixed bug in trim naming system that does not carry the name over to advance design.
-Fixed bug in Local Inventory reports which showed wrong inventory levels in certain circumstances.
-Fixed missing data bug in View Details panel for factories.
-Increased Click timeout rate as Crimson AMD drivers are having frame rate issues with shadows.
-Decreased Shadow texture quality. May disable high quality shadows for AMD Crimson drivers. (Getting too many negative reviews from people who won't email me if the game is crashing constantly on their computers :'( )
-Fixed bug with mouse wheel that did not update mouse position over lists. (Thus allowing for incorrect clicking positions)

We've also been working on some features:
-Administration costs and employee levels now increase linearly with the number of active marques you have.
- Restructured Marketing internally. This should improve marketing performance (and save game file size) dramatically by combining budgets for each vehicle into a single row instead of individual rows.

Please note, you may have seen an important thread I linked here about moving marketing to the branch level: http://steamcommunity.com/app/285110/dis...019800454/ I have pushed back this decision until 1.19.2 since it will not be that difficult to implement with this new restructure. (Most likely we'll be doing it, but I'm still leaving it open for debate to see what folks have to say!)


-Marketing information (Such as costs or employees) are now pulled from a past saved record instead of directly from the current funding. (Meaning expense reports will show what you did last turn not what you're doing this turn...)
-Marketing employee calculations have been simplified, employee count has increased.
-Updated all third party libraries to the newest versions. (Still requires stability testing.)
-Recompiled everything with _secure_scl disabled, this should greatly improve turn times, however stability testing is still required and may be re-enabled.

Some vector and sqlite db transaction optimizations have also happened. Until 1.19.2 rolls around I'm just touching these when ever I come across them to reduce the load when I have to do all of them.

Today I started working on the Employee Benefit system. Which you may have heard me refer to it as the Pension system. However using this word typically creates confusion. In most of Europe/Australasia, pensions are viewed as a government only form of retirement payment system collected via taxes. But a pension is actually a term for any type of retirement savings not controlled by the individual. In most places with skilled unionized workers a corporate pension system will exist along side government ran systems and private systems. Such systems have slowly died off in recent years... Anyhoo this is an explanation to a forum post from a few years ago. And I've digressed.

Employee Benefits are much broader than pensions. In GC we'll be implementing two types of Employee Benefits, Defined Contribution (DC)[en.wikipedia.org] and Defined Benefit (DB) [en.wikipedia.org]

DC- is a monthly payment to employees. We'll be using this to cover other monthly employee benefit expenses besides retirement. This system will cover their health insurance, life insurance, payroll taxes, 401k's, etc. For instance in the USA, if you worked a company with a 1:1 match on your 401k, for every dollar you invest in your retirement the company will invest a dollar into your retirement.

Gameplay wise you won't have to worry about the fine detail. You will simply be presented with dialog and/or a slider that will adjust the percentage of your employee salaries you pay out.


DB- Is a little more complex. The Defined Benefit system was the most popular type of retirement savings outside of government programs up until 401k (DC) started to push them out in the 90s. DB can be extremely dangerous if the funds are not properly managed, one can argue that DB liabilities are what lead to the bankruptcy of companies like GM.

So what is it? There are a number of different types, but I'll explain the most simplest in the simplest form. In short, employees are required to pay into a fund. The company manages this fund, invests the money, and tries to grow it. Once the employee retires, he withdraws an agreed upon amount for an an agreed upon amount of time (typically life.)

The easiest payment method to calculate (and the one we'll use in game) is called Money times Service. For instance. You're 20 years old. You pay a fee of $100 a month or so. For every year you work, you'll get $10 a month when you retire. You work 45 years, retiring at 65. 45 year * $10 = $450/month in retirement. If you live for another 10 years, the company will pay you a total of $54,000 while you're retired. In this case, the fund would break even because you paid in $54,000. But what if you lived 15 years? Your payment would be $81,000... The fund would have to make up the other $27,000...

Gameplay wise, you will have to worry about fees (how much employees pay), payouts (how much you pay per year of service), and unfunded liabilities.

Both systems will be manageable by the AI so you don't have to micromanage if you don't want.


The real benefit of this system will be in expanding the Union negotiations.

[Eric.B]

Whoa! We've had a huge influx of new players over the last week! Welcome to all the new folks around here! We broke our concurrent player count record with 73 players! http://steamcharts.com/app/285110

With a bunch of new people comes a bunch of community relations and tech support work from me. I've found out that I broke the shadow system in 1.19 on newer video cards. Sadly I can't release a hot patch because I've changed the entire build system for speed improvements in 1.19.1

Anyhoo, work on the benefits system continues and we have implemented most of the backend for this system. Now I just need to implement the front end. (Allowing you to adjust benefits payouts, fees, and contribute funds. Then finally get the AI to do the same thing.) I haven't did as much work on this as much as I wanted the last few days. But as the current sale ends, roadmap assigned ticket pace should get back to normal.

So the last 4 days was mostly focused on bugs and tech support issues people have submitted. This is an incomplete list as I did not make tickets of the recent posts, emails, and PM's you all have given me. Instead I just fixed them as I got them, and ticketed the ones I don't plan on fixing it asap (Mostly because that segment of the game will be completely changed or it's too much work to do on the fly while I have half the current internal development build broken.) Here is what I can remember or see off the top of my head:
-Fixed crash when switching back to office while in the middle of creating a custom district on the world map.
-Fixed bug in Mega Menu and World Map which did not list vehicles that were for sale but production had ended.
-Fixed bug when closing a factory it does not remove engine contracts assigned to it.
-Fixed bug when taking over a company you do not inherit contracts.
-Fixed bug engine contract breach bug.
-Fixed remove contracted engine from factory bug in Assigned Contracts window.

[Eric.B]

Finally finished the benefits system. You can now adjust payout and fees for the 5 employee groups as well submit funding to your DB funds. Coming in the next few days we'll rewrite the union system to have them force you to give your workers some benefits...

I've made adjustments to the transportation costs, city infrastructure ratings as well as local gas prices on both ends (factory/branch) now play more of an effect.

Merchandising revenues have been added. If your Global Image or Racing Image is above 50 points and the year is greater than 1925, you'll start to receive revenues from selling out your company's IP to clothes makers, toy companies, video game makers, etc. This is currently modeled after Ford and Ferrari's merchandising income levels. Might need to be adjusted down.

We don't show you what kind of merchandising your selling in the world. Use your imagination.

This system also takes into account your Marketing Skills as well the number of branches you have. (For example, no one in America buys Citron merchandise because there are no Citron branches here...)

I've now started on racing revenues. This will be broken down into 2 phases. The first phase, what I'm working on now, you will receive income for providing support to multi-team based series like MASSCAR. These sort of series you typically supply a few engineers and components to companies who build engines or cars for many teams. This sort of revenues will be generated automatically.

The second phase will be implemented in v1.23. In that phase we'll be working the revised contract system into racing, thus making you have to produce vehicles/engines for more generic racing type events like "La Mens" series which supply hundreds of vehicles.


-Defined Contribution Benefits System and other monthly Employee Benefits
-Defined Benefit (Corporate Pension) payouts and funds system.
-Adjustments to shipping costs
-Merchandising Revenues
-Adjustments to Marketing Skill growths
-Fixed 1997 Hong Kong Flag Crash
-Fixed Racing "Signed Teams" bug

[Eric.B]

Work continued on the racing revenues system. You now get revenues based on unit costs, number of signed teams, funding mod value (unseen value, more expensive the series the more stuff they buy.) As well as your points results and wins. From a couple of test runs it seems about 25% of companies can run a fiscally successful racing program. More tweaks will come to this in the future as more playtesting happens.

Racing results have also been tweaked. The calculation speed should increase greatly, as well the winning results should now be more distributed among teams. Also the results should now be a bit more realistic (No more 1hp engines beating 14hp engines for example...) These fixes were needed for the racing revenues system otherwise revenues were really lumped toward the winners...

Also fixed number of minor bugs in the Racing UI and the missing View Competition button has been brought back.

Fixed a crashing bug in Mega Menu when switching factories when you don't have any. Also fixed a few other missing factory/branch bugs in Mega Menu. (Need to double check if this works on OSX.)

Fixed issue in Magazine Model Compare which causes incorrect data in the right column.

I've rewritten the backend to the strike/moral system which should improve speed and will make it easier to implement the new planned features.

I attempted to merge car manufacturing employees into a single employee/wage/moral for each factory. I got about halfway done before I ran into roadblock which would prove to be too much work and too much rewriting for very little gain. Instead I will implement a GUI shim in the office HR for v1.21 which will allow you to adjust all factory employees/wages for all production lines (Thus replacing what is there now.) But internally the system will remain the same. (The main reason for this is the upcoming Employee "Furlough" system which will effect your moral for constantly firing and hiring employees.)


So now I am implementing Racing Engineer Employees into the Researching Employee stuff. I will also be creating a GUI shim for Research HR (allowing you to hire all engineers as one with HR) in v1.21...

After that I begin implementing the new Union negotiation system. Benefits effects on moral and negotiations. AI implementation of these features.

Currently 1.19.1 is sitting at 68% finished, the above things and employee furlough system are the only major tickets remaining, the rest can be taken care of rather quickly. So we're about 2-weeks away from an update.

-Racing Revenues
-Revised Racing Results
-Racing View Competition
-Fixed Racing Champ series selection breaking Racing Funding and View Competition windows when both are open.
-Fixed Mega Menu Factory Change crash when no factories in company
-Fixed Mega Menu Branch assigning when there is no branch in city.
-Fixed Magazine Model Comparison bug that caused incorrect data on right column.
-Rewrite Strike Timing System and Strike Wage Check system.
-Adjusted Moral Decline/Gain based on wages.

[Eric.B]

1.19.1 is just about ready. Release date for Testing Build is February 4th.
I've spent the last week mostly cleaning up the Strike/Union/Benefits system. I'm trying to get it closer to production ready than Early Access ready since we're only ~6 major versions (1.25) from being finished. I want to go back over and clean up as little as possible in future builds.

So what have I done?
-Racing Employees (They're tied to Researching Employees)
-AI assigns benefits
-Employee Moral Effected by poor benefits, strikes may happen now even when using auto-wages.
-Union Benefits Action Memo
-Strike Action Memo
-Removed Unions from Phone Menu in Office. All Strikes will now cause Action Memos.
-Changed Agreed Strike Wages checking system. Should be less buggy.
-Union Benefits Demand Negotiations. (Might be able to save a few % if your company is doing poorly)
-Benefits Systems is opt-in. If you play the game on Easy or Medium you will have to check Benefits System on in the Advanced Settings. If you play the game on Hard the Benefits System will automatically be on in the Advanced Settings.
-HR Employee Hiring now shows Strike Agreed Wages instead of Average.
-Agreeing to new benefits package will reset department moral.
-Adjusted down branch employee numbers.
-Fixed incorrect amount of branch employees on new game starter branch.
-Automatically increase the amount of branch employees needed every year.
-1 additional branch employee needed for every 100 vehicles sold.


Currently I'm working on the Factory Employee Furlough System. When you adjust production numbers which results in people not working they will go into the "Furlough Pool." When you hire people to work in production they will pull from the "Furlough Pool," Over time this pool will decrease in size as people quit or are laid off. The amount of employees you have in the pool will reduce employee moral. However people who disappear from the pool will decrease moral even more.

After the Furlough system is completed, I'll be down to one more feature ticket, which may be pushed back, and 4 bug tickets. Which means I should get a couple days of play testing to make sure all these new features work well in the game.

[Frankschtaldt]

1.2 is going to be good!
Sounds like it'll ad a lot of depth.

[Eric.B]

I've implemented a few new features for 1.19.1, the first of which is the Employee Furlough system. When you reduce production lines or finish designing components instead of immediately firing employees these employees are throwing into a "Furlough Pool." These are employees that are still technically employed by your company but are not working and are not paid. When you hire more employees, new employees are pulled from the furlough pool first before new employees are added.

Every month the ratio of employees furloughed to working will effect your employee Moral. There are limitations to the effects. Likewise every month roughly 10% of these furloughed employees will be laid off or quit. This pulls down moral a little more, but your ratio of furloughed to working will be less the next month.

Another minor cost feature was added to factory production. The more distinct components you produce in a factory will increase the factory monthly costs by an additional 2%. This means if your factory is producing two vehicles using the same chassis/engine/gearboxes then there is no penalty. However if you're producing 10 cars all with different chassis/engines/gearboxes, expect 60% increase in monthly factory costs. (These numbers may be adjusted before 1.19.1 comes out.)

I've added a Low Definition texture toggle to the settings. This should make the game playable on very old video cards such as the Intel i915 as well make mobile/embedded GPU (such as PowerVR) support more likely. (ARM and MIPS support anyone?)

Here are a few things I've Implemented and fixed since the last post that will be included in 1.19.1:

-Employee Furlough System
-Fixed Wealthy car index (Limos, Landu, Supercars) insane margins bug.
-Disabled Dynamic Popularity for wealth index car types above 6 (Luxury Sedans, Limos, Landus, Supercars)
-Monthly Factory Costs increase based on how many different components are being produced at the factory.
-Fixed bug in assisted chassis designer, does engine fit tool.
-Low Definition Texture toggle.
-Improved decal system selectability. (Modern Headlights/Tailights and up coming stuff such as door jams.)
-Fixed compositor and shader crash in OSX
-Fixed possible crashes in OSX
-Fixed upgrading factory bug which charges 2 additional months of construction costs.
-Minor boost to buying populations in normal and hard mode.

[Frankschtaldt]

-Monthly Factory Costs increase based on how many different components are being produced at the factory.

When using regions to manage multiple factories at once will the game try to minimise this extra cost or will it continue to spread production evenly around the factories in the region?

Also, how will this extra cost be allocated in the fiscal reports? It's going to be hard to determine if a model is in fact profitable if these kinds of add on costs are simply averaged across all models. Like how the racing costs being averaged across branches can make profitable branches look like they are loosing money at the moment.

[Eric.B]

When using regions to manage multiple factories at once will the game try to minimise this extra cost or will it continue to spread production evenly around the factories in the region?

It will continue to spread it out as transportation costs are generally more expensive than this added cost. I should note I have reduced both factory build costs as well as factory monthly costs to offset this added expense. So the costs increases are not as bad as they seem. I'm also considering dropping the expense from 2% to 1.5%

Also, how will this extra cost be allocated in the fiscal reports? It's going to be hard to determine if a model is in fact profitable if these kinds of add on costs are simply averaged across all models. Like how the racing costs being averaged across branches can make profitable branches look like they are loosing money at the moment.

The costs are embedded into the factory monthly costs. Just as line usage is. So if your factory is building 5 cars with no shared components. And the factory supports 20 lines. And each car is using 2 Lines then the monthly costs for the factory is simply:MonthlyCosts = BaseMonthlyCosts * ((10+2lines used)/(20+2total lines)) + (BaseMonthlyCosts * 0.02 * 15 number of different components)

Then individual car, like in manufacturing costs on the side panel would simply factor in: BaseMonthlyCosts * ((2+2lines used for specific car)/(20+2total lines)) + (BaseMonthlyCosts * 0.02 * (15 number of different components / 5 number of cars) )

So it's integrated into the factory monthly costs and distributed the same as line use is. (Calculated at individual factory level.) So technically the cost is spread out among the cars being built at that factory. But this costs isn't really individual car costs, but a factory cost which should be shared by all at the factory IMO.

As for detailed reports on this. I have not implemented them. The entire report system is getting a major overhaul in 1.21, a complete from nothing rewrite. So I haven't bothered doing much more than the above to the existing systems.

[Eric.B]

The last 7 days I've focused purely on optimizing turn times. As of right now there is between 25%-45% reduction in turn times over v1.19.1.***

There is probably another 10-25% I can squeeze out not including possible gains from AI and Stock Market improvements. But I'm going to wait until I improve the AI first before switching back to optimizations.

Since turn times are moving faster, I can now take that saved time and use it to improve the AI. On top of this I plan on making the AI more efficient as well. Hopefully net-net we'll have both a faster AI system and a better AI system.


***Currently simulating the game from 1900 to 1930 with full AI on easy using my AMD Phenom 9550. No player interaction. 24.5% gains before optimizing the consumer AI, 45.3% after optimizing consumer AI. Changes to consumer AI flow has caused some AI to go bankrupt faster, so speed gains may not be as high after I have improved the AI.



Also if you crashing issues with shadows or alt tabbing in the past, please try out 1.19.1 and let me know if you still have these issues. Thanks!

[Eric.B]

Just to give a little update.

I continue to work on improving the AI. Vehicle design, production, factory building, and a few other things have been tweaked.

As of right now a full (300) AI, on a 30 year simulation, is producing a 30mb save game file. Where as 1.19.1 produces a 10mb save game file.

While this is a flawed measurement. It is pretty safe to assume that the AI is producing roughly 3 times the output. Looking at the raw data, more companies are staying in business, and more cars are being built. Awesome!

But with all good things there is some bad. I spent the first few weeks of 1.19.2 optimizing the game because I anticipated improved AI will result in slower turn times. And I was correct.

With a 10mb save game, the current code is roughly 30% faster than 1.19.1. However with the AI producing more data, full AI turn times are now 2.8x slower! I should be able to optimize this even more. But it's looking like I won't be able to drastically improve the AI without a nearly linear increase in turn times.

There is a silver lining however. With improved AI, Random 50-100 AI should provide the same amount of challenge as 1.19.1's AI while at the same time having faster turn times than 1.19.1 full AI.

Also in v1.22 I will be implementing new maps which will have fewer cities. Less cities means less data to process while forcing players/AI to step on each other's feet more.

So net net, we're moving in a good direction. I would say 1.19.2 is a little over halfway finished.

[Eric.B]

Work is just about complete with improving the AI. In fact, it's working so well that very few companies fail! Some more minor adjustments will be made to knock out a few more companies, as well create more mergers. I'm aiming for a 50% fail/merge rate. Currently that rate is around 10%.

I believe I can wrap up most of what I have planned by the end of the month. Add another week for a couple of minor new features and a few days play testing and we'll be good to go for 1.19.2!

-Fixed assists evaluation on stock prices which caused for rapped stock crashes of profitable companies.
-Fixed AI lobbying bug that caused buffer overflow errors when building factories.

[Eric.B]

Some more optimizations have netted us some more speed. We've reduced the number of string comparisons in sqlite, replaced our string converter system, and hash_mapped a few more of our rb tree maps! Currently working out any possible bugs these optimizations could have caused. (Switching out old well tested stable code for newer faster untested code is always scary!) I haven't done enough profiling to pinpoint the exact gains (and errors could skew my current results) but if it holds up, we're looking at roughly 20% performance gain with 110% AI output over 1.19.1!

AI starting funds have been greatly reduced. Its now much closer to the player's starting funds. This causes the rate of failure closer to what I want it to be at. On the flip side, AI starting factories are much larger than player's.

There are still a few more things I want to do with the AI. But they'll have to wait until I redesign the Finance/Stock system and move marketing to the branch system.

What else?

I've added in a few "Advance Game Settings" that will allow you to adjust consumer population rates, consumer spending power, starting AI bonus money, and how often AI will adjust its production. (Default is set to every turn. However on slower machines you may want to change it to once every 2 or 3 turns.) With these new settings you can adjust your difficulty beyond the 3 radio buttons.

I've also began purging old data from the save games. Namely old user generated reports after 3 years and News older than 10 years. This should reduce the size of save games somewhat. These changes may be superseded when I redo Office GUI in v1.21.

We've also added new component images. These new images have alpha channel around the edges thus allowing you to see what you select. Buttons with blue prints in them have been shrunk. And these images have been tailored to fit better so there is no blurry images from scaling. There shouldn't be any place holders with component images now.


There are a couple more tickets left, some will be pushed back to 1.19.4 or 1.20, some more play testing needs to be done, but it's looking like we'll be set to release 1.19.2 on the 11th!

[Eric.B]

I released 1.19.2 this morning,

Tonight I fixed a bug in the factory redesign system and released it in an "unannounced" hotfix.

Enjoy.

[Eric.B]

Long time no update,

The last few days I have either been without internet or without development computers. And sometimes without both! Sadly the internet situation won't be solved anytime soon due to circumstances beyond my control. However I should be back into a normal programming routine starting Monday.

In any event, I have been working on a hotfix for 1.19.2 that should resolve a number of issues and bugs. Sadly without internet, it's kinda hard to upload them to Steam. But soon.

This is an incomplete list, I haven't been keeping too much of a record of what I have fixed.
-Displaying incorrect monthly expense in sales book when updating factories.
-Fixed crash when creating custom districts with no cities.
-Fixed inactive model listing in RnD View Parts/Vehicles.
-Fixed possibility to get negative points in racing.
-Fixed bug in marketing which deletes all marketing in a city if you 0 out a single type
-Fixed slider position issue in megamenu
-Fixed bug in AI which caused vehicles to be sold at production costs when opening new branches.
-Improved AI single cylinder designs to prevent 0hp cars.
-Fixed view factory costs in world map view factory details
-Fixed bug calculating factory labor.
-Disabled charts for the first year of the game to prevent crashing (Charts are going to be redesigned in v1.21.)